Taking It Page 3

  “I don’t work for the company,” he said. “I own it.”

  This did shut me up for a minute, but not because I was impressed. His company logo was the outline of a man carrying a pool on his back, a little-kid-type pool with the water sloshing out. The little man is one of those cartoon figures I can’t stand, where the head is very big and the body very small. The name on the little blue pickup was Aquascan, not a bad name, but the pool man must have made up the cartoon all by himself, or maybe picked it out of a graphics catalog.

  I had to imagine the pool man, Yeah, that looks like a good logo; I want to drive around in a truck with that little man with the big head on it.

  “I used to think I wanted to be a teacher,” he said. “I wanted to teach chemistry.”

  I liked chemistry well enough—litmus paper and equations, Mr. Welling handing out quizzes you had to fill in sitting on metal stools, a lab sink and a swan-neck faucet at your elbow. I liked biology a lot more—amoebas and vertebrae.

  My dad called the pool man Barry, and he called my dad Mr. Charles, but as usual I realized I didn’t know very much about this man. I couldn’t just call him Barry. I should call him Mister Something, but that made me feel all the more like someone he wouldn’t take seriously.

  Now that Barry had begun to look at me straight on, I was glad I was wearing that oversize pool robe my mother brought me from Palm Springs, one of those big hooded robes made of the same stuff towels are made of, so you don’t have to dry off; the material soaks up the moisture.

  “Your dad be home soon?” he asked.

  It was one of those situations where you try to guess what the questioner wants to hear. My dad was likable, and when he and the pool man talked they seemed to get along fine, talking about how much water gets lost to evaporation and how much because of microfissures in the pool bottom, cracks no one can see with the naked eye.

  But for some reason I had the impression he wanted my dad to not be home, maybe so he could get up the nerve it would take to sit down in one of the pool chairs and have a conversation with me.

  “I never know what he’s going to do,” I said at last.

  Now that I had Barry’s attention, I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want to talk about my dad. But there was something about Barry that kept me looking at him, not wanting the conversation to end.

  “Are you cold?” said Barry, putting the lid back on the pool heater. He stood on the lid to make sure it was on snug. He was wearing Sperry Top-Siders, the kind with the white soles that keep you from slipping. He wasn’t looking at me, coiling the tube of the water vacuum.

  “A little,” I said.

  I could see now what it was about Barry that kept me standing there. His eyes were the color of Adler’s eyes, gray, and he was slow and careful, like Adler. Adler talks to me like this, the man who had just married my mother.

  My mother got everything she wanted out of life. All she had to do was reach out and take it.

  7

  “People think since this is California, they ought to have a pool,” Barry was saying.

  “I like to swim,” I said. He knew all about that. He was always cleaning my hair out of the filter.

  “This is what I call soft-core California,” he said. “San Francisco, the East Bay, all of it hardly ever gets really warm.”

  “It’s warm enough,” I said. Maybe talking to Maureen gets me into the habit of arguing.

  “You dad tells me you’re going to study pre-law,” he said.

  “I still have a year of high school,” I responded. “My dad was the best student Boalt Law School ever had,” I added. “He was in a debate once with the dean of the law school.”

  “I bet he won the debate.”

  “Of course. It’s famous.”

  “What was the debate about?”

  “It was a joke subject, one of those they pick just to get an argument going. Whether or not the Earth was flat.”

  Barry gave a little laugh. “Did he prove it was flat?”

  “It is.”

  It was a joke of my own, but he didn’t laugh again. He slung the coiled tube over his shoulder.

  “Your dad helped me with my business papers,” Barry said. “It’s a fictitious firm name,” he said. “Aquascan. You have to make sure no other company has the same name—”

  “Or maybe there’s a Mr. Aquascan,” I said, “born with that name, cleaning pools somewhere.”

  “Right,” Barry said. “Otto Aquascan.”

  “That could be the name of the guy on the truck,” I said. “You could call him that.” I didn’t say that stupid-looking cartoon figure you picked for your company.

  “What guy?” said Barry, and I could tell I was losing it, the energy going out of the conversation already. It didn’t take long, especially with someone older, someone busy, someone who probably had eight girlfriends, all of them with MAs in chemistry. You can only keep their attention and their respect so long, and then something distracts them, they have someplace to go or a call to make.

  “Oh, him!” said Barry at last. “My partner picked him out. Otto Aquascan.”

  “He’s cute,” I said, which was about the exact opposite of what I really thought. I don’t know what happens to my mouth sometimes—it says things and I can’t stop it.

  “I’m glad you think so.” Barry was heading toward the gate, a trickle of water following him from the coiled tube on his shoulder.

  All I could think was: I can’t stand waiting all by myself for my father to come home and go through the same things we’ve been through before.

  I knew I could explain myself. I simply wanted to fast-forward through this next couple of hours, and get to where my father had worried himself into a state of talked-out exhaustion, and then we’d watch one of his old videos, Marines blowing up castles held by Nazis.

  I swam back and forth underwater, the water pressure in my ears hurting a little. Swimming underwater is my favorite exercise, but the fact is I don’t swim as often as I should. If I want to lose a little weight I just tend to stop eating for a while.

  I took a hot shower, and after I used some of that cologne Mother left when she moved to Oakland, I put on the kind of clothes I used to wear, a full cotton skirt with little orange flowers and an oversize Indonesian cotton blouse, a shirt designed for a man to wear, tiki pattern all over it in purple.

  I sat in my bedroom and slipped the scrapbook out of the bottom drawer. It was a secret, and I kept it under an old photo album and a pair of white, gold-trimmed cowgirl boots I had outgrown before junior high.

  They were articles by Adler. He writes about why people overeat, why we get headaches. There was an article on bed-wetting, how parents need to reassure children. There was an article I had reread so many times it was coming loose off the page. It was on our dreams, and what it means when we fall in love with someone in a dream, a person we have never seen before.

  I put the scrapbook back in the bottom drawer, all the way in the back where no one would see it even if they looked, covered up with a folder of drawings from primary school, my first alphabet.

  I needed to talk to Ted. He sends me a message sometimes on the computer and says he’s doing okay. That’s it for Ted. My brother would rather dig a hole than talk on the telephone. His computer messages are impersonal, but interesting. Once he found a rattlesnake skin with the rattle attached on top of the air conditioner, and he wondered how it got up there, maybe a flying snake.

  Dad said Ted was going to be a major success in landscaping, but I knew my dad would never stop wondering why Ted couldn’t go to school and turn into a younger version of Dad. He expected us to like what he liked, the same movies, the same cars.

  I sat in the living room, waiting to catch Dad on the way in, get it over with, maybe tell him about the scrape in the Mustang’s bumper, a detail I had never mentioned. You can play a situation like this several ways, you just have to take your time to deal, like solitaire, make sure every card gets put ne
atly onto the right pile.

  My dad once told me there isn’t such a thing as insanity in a medical sense. It’s a word lawyers and newspapers use, the insanity defense. You don’t hear a doctor saying that one of his patients is completely insane. Or crazy. Psychologists don’t confer with each other describing a client as completely crazy.

  It became clear after a while that my dad was not coming home, making me wait, letting me twist on my rope. Maybe he would stay out all night, the way he did sometimes.

  When the phone rang, I let the machine answer it. I knew it might be Mom, calling to see if I was okay, but I had a feeling it was Dad, calling to tell me where he was. Every time it rang, I just sat there.

  If he wanted me to wait, that’s what I would do.

  8

  Some people keep tapes of sports bloopers, referees slipping, landing on their butts. Some people keep tapes of naked men and women, gasping and sweaty.

  Dad keeps videotapes of depositions, people explaining how their lives became empty, lifeless planets. He stores them in a box. He uses them in his law practice—people testifying who, for some reason, can’t or won’t go before a judge and jury.

  I found one tape especially interesting. On this tape a woman tells the story of how her husband, estranged for six months, came home while the live-in maid was away. The husband tried to seize a portrait of her, an oil painting, rip it right off the wall.

  Then he tried to force himself on the woman, to use my dad’s phrase, but the husband had been drinking, and one thing did not necessarily lead to another. He hurt the woman, falling on top of her, pinching a major nerve. Now she had trouble getting up and walking, gravity too painful for her. She had to testify in a wheelchair in her living room. She wore sparkling black earrings and too much eye makeup.

  Sometimes her emotions were so strong she couldn’t talk. I watched this tape, waiting for my father to come home. The tape had a halting, authentic feeling to it, a Court TV appeal, not at all like a soap, where you know the people are actors and only pretending.

  This woman was pretending, too. She was pretending she would be all right someday.

  Dad opened the door and came in, briefcase in one hand, keys in the other. He hurried in, just as his voice on the tape was asking the woman to describe the nightmares she had when she finally got to sleep.

  He tossed the briefcase onto the sofa. “What are you watching that for?” he said, switching off the television.

  I couldn’t think of an answer.

  “I came home as fast as I could,” he said. He was breathless. “My day blew up.”

  I just sat there. It was late, after nine, but not as late as it could have been.

  “I had a horrible day,” he said. “I’m all set to go to trial tomorrow, feeling great, and my client goes and does something incredibly stupid. I had the worst day I have had in years.”

  He noticed I wasn’t saying anything. “You got my messages.” He looked at me. My dad doesn’t look at me often, doesn’t look at anyone. He likes to talk while he looks at something else, the parrot fish or the news. But he looked at me now, really seeing me.

  I shrugged with one shoulder.

  “What happened today?” he said.

  He meant: to me, at the department store, and I felt myself teeter on the edge of something. The VCR was still running even though the TV screen was blank, and it made a small electronic hum on the shelf under my dad’s war movie collection.

  I started to tell him, but everything in my mind shut down. I thought I was going to cry.

  “Is this how it’s going to be from now on?” he asked.

  The only really important thing you learn from a lawyer is when to shut up.

  Dad kept talking. “You’re going to start stealing things, is that it?”

  I looked away. I tried to say I didn’t do it. No sound came out.

  “My career is hamstringing me right now, Anna. I don’t have time for anything extra.”

  I couldn’t look at him.

  “If you’re going to start engaging in criminal behavior, please let me know so I can make some arrangements.” He liked talking like this, businesslike and crisp, battling the universe without getting his suit wrinkled.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said, clearly this time.

  He thought about this. He paced around a little, pulling at his lower lip.

  “I know Jane pretty well,” he said at last. “The manager of the store. She and I spent some time together last year.” He meant that the manager of I. Magnin was a former girlfriend. He liked to make you work to understand him. It made him a little hard to follow, but it could be fun, playing Ping-Pong with a pro.

  “Maybe she’s just getting back at me,” Dad said. “Needling me. Telling me my daughter’s a thief.”

  I looked away, at the floor, at the high polish on my dad’s black shoes. Sometimes when I’m talking to my father, the world vanishes, every city, every other human being. There is nothing but the two of us.

  “She said the store made a mistake,” Dad was saying. “But she had an attitude, the way she said it. They touched you, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Be sure, Anna. This is important.”

  “Tell me why you’re so late.”

  I almost never talk to my dad so directly, and he sat down, my words pushing him into the recliner. The chair went all the way back, folded out, so his feet were out. He hunched around, trying to get the footrest to tuck back in.

  “I left three different messages,” he said. “I’m not the one sitting there with eye makeup down my face.”

  “You don’t want to pursue this,” I said, using one of his phrases. It’s not hard to sound like a lawyer. You didn’t want to pursue certain matters when the totality of the situation meant you were acting like a retard.

  “It’s really between me and Jane,” Dad said. “If she and I had never dated, she wouldn’t have decided to make a fuss about you. She wanted to embarrass me.”

  Dated. Dad would come out with a word like that sometimes, as though he were still a teenager in some earlier era. He had girlfriends and blind dates, a man who defended ex-mayors, talking like he was back in high school.

  “She was right.” The words popped out of me.

  He didn’t hear me.

  But then he did, realizing what I had said, after a few seconds. He has a face people like, an oddly familiar look. Sometimes I go to a banquet with Dad, Dad wanting to include me in his life, and people whisper to me, Is he on TV? And I smile.

  His face looks good in photographs. Only in person do you see his gaze moving around while people talk to him.

  “You didn’t really try to steal anything, did you?” he asked.

  I shut up.

  He struggled to get out of the chair, and then gave up. He just sat there, looking at the ceiling. “God help me,” he said.

  I just sat there.

  “I can’t take it,” he said. “I’ve done all I can. You people are going to tear me apart, one little piece at a time.”

  He didn’t mean you people. He meant you women.

  He meant his clients, his paralegals, his contacts in the media, everybody.

  “You’re not going to do this to me,” he said.

  And then I began to talk.

  Sometimes my father really listens. It isn’t often, but it happens. The two of us have a planet to ourselves.

  9

  I kept my voice steady. It only took a few minutes. I think I even took a small, bitter pleasure in it. “I pretend I’m stealing things,” I said.

  I could feel him listening, feel him not wanting to.

  My words were a new third person in the room, an intruder. Maybe I had expected him to deny the possibility, insist that it wasn’t true.

  I said, “I made myself quit.”

  “Until today,” he said. He was out of the chair, beginning to pace the room the way I had expected him to.

  I didn’t respond.

&nb
sp; “You pretend,” he said, a half question.

  I hate it when my voice comes out sounding like someone who hasn’t spoken in ten thousand years. I whispered, “That’s right.”

  “Except today. Today you weren’t pretending.” My father got the point too quickly. He couldn’t keep from sounding like a lawyer lancing a star witness.

  I felt myself going dry inside. “What happened to your client?” I asked.

  My question didn’t even seem to make sense to him. But then he turned to look at me and he said, “He disappeared.”

  “The child molester?”

  My dad inclined his head a little, not wanting to acknowledge the possible guilt of one of his wealthy clients, and maybe not wanting to discuss child molesters with me in any detail.

  “He ran away?” I said.

  “The trial begins tomorrow. His wife doesn’t know anything. His friends all know nothing. I go to his house, a big place, up in the hills, nice view. The guy’s gone.”

  “Maybe he’ll be back.”

  “I know the signs.”

  “You can’t tell what someone else is doing.”

  He let himself look at me. “True.”

  My feelings kept me quiet for a moment.

  My dad knows how to keep talking while things settle down emotionally. “He left with snapshots of his wife, his mom and dad. He took funny little things, his grandfather’s cuff links, odd keepsakes you want with you when you’re never coming back.”

  He was not pacing, he was just standing, looking at the fish in the aquarium.

  There is a loach who lives at the bottom of the fish tank and feeds on the moss that grows on the sand. He never asked how is the tang, how is the parrot fish. It was always: How is the coolie loach doing? It was a little fish that was colorless and thoughtful-looking, one of those students who study hard and barely pass. I think he liked it because you had to think before you could see it, figure out where it might be.